by Gary Mead
John Nettleton’s VC, awarded for a low-level daylight raid on the MAN diesel-engine factory at Augsburg, Bavaria, on 17 April 1942, illustrates the point. This raid was a formidable task, requiring the aircraft and their eighty-five-strong aircrew to fly 700 miles across France and Germany (and back) in broad daylight. It was predestined to be an expensive raid in terms of lives and aircraft. First into the attack was the squadron led by South African-born Acting Squadron Leader John Nettleton, of 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron. He led a formation of twelve Lancaster bombers, newly in service, in the attack; four were shot down on the way, but he continued and, amid fierce anti-aircraft fire (which brought down three more Lancasters), bombed the factory. Five aircraft, including Nettleton’s, returned safely to Britain.26 Churchill called the Augsburg raid ‘an outstanding achievement of the RAF’, even though Lord Selborne, Minister of Economic Warfare, complained that his ministry had not been consulted by Bomber Command and thought the attack would delay submarine production by three months at most. In a broadcast BBC interview on 19 April 1942, Nettleton provided just the kind of rallying tone required:
We Lancaster crews believe that in the Lancaster we have got the answer for heavy bombing. We have tremendous confidence in everything about the Lancasters and in the workers who are turning them out in such numbers. We know that we are only sent to attack the most worthwhile targets. We believe that the way to win the war is to have our own spring offensive before Hitler has his and in places not of his choice but of ours.27
The general public had been made aware of the Lancaster, depicted as a war-winning weapon, for the first time. Nettleton’s action – and that of the rest of the Lancaster crews that day – was courageous, certainly; it was also useful propaganda, showing a will to take the fight to the enemy. Squadron Leader J. S. Sherwood DFC, who led 97 Squadron, which followed up 44 Squadron, was recommended for the VC but got nothing, even though he was killed in the action. The Sunday Pictorial of 19 April was in no doubt what should happen. ‘Give Them All the VC’, it declared in a subhead below the banner headline ‘Most Daring Raid Of War’:
No greater story of personal daring and gallantry has ever been printed than that told on this page today . . . Heroism of this kind must be rewarded without delay. In the name of the people who today read with astonishment the story of their great deed, the Sunday Pictorial asks that these twelve pilots should be awarded the Victoria Cross. Just as no one will feel that justice has been done until every member of their crews has received the Distinguished Flying Medal.
Nine days after the raid Nettleton’s VC was gazetted, along with lesser decorations for all the Augsburg survivors.28 The dead may have been just as brave; but they received nothing.
The VC continued to serve two purposes: most obviously, the recognition of supreme courage; most pertinently (if less obviously), the rewarding of those who could be held up as examples to the nation and an inspiration to their fellow countrymen, such as Group Captain Leonard Cheshire. No one could deny that his VC was deserved, for countless acts of determined bravery against considerable odds. As his citation said,29 Cheshire gained it not for any particular action but for completing 100 missions over four years, for his ‘cold and calculated acceptance of risks’, for ‘placing himself invariably in the forefront of the battle’. But much the same could have been said of the fighter pilot Squadron Leader ‘Johnny’ Johnson and his own hundreds of operational sorties. The difference between Cheshire and Johnson was not their level of courage, but of how useful they were as propaganda tools and how well their function served strategic aims: bombing Germany to dust had a higher priority, and a much higher public profile, than shooting down enemy aircraft.
In the case of the army, the British and colonial contingents of which took the lion’s share of VCs during the Second World War – 137, almost 75 per cent of the total – there was a tendency early in the war to reward good service couched in terms of ‘conspicuous gallantry’, such as the VC awarded to Second Lieutenant Premindra Singh Bhagat, of the Corps of Indian Engineers. Bhagat had been recommended for an MC in 1940 in East Africa, but that had been downgraded to a Mention in Despatches. He gained his VC while serving in Ethiopia in January and February 1941. Over four days and for a distance of fifty-five miles, while mounted in a Bren carrier, he detected and supervised the clearance of fifteen minefields, twice having his carrier blown up and once being ambushed. Brave man, but his deeds were probably not particularly unusual.
As the war drew on and the Simonds’s directive became more widely inculcated, what was demanded for VC eligibility was not only to remain coolly determined when under fire – the Cheshire VC, for example – but to demonstrate extreme anger in the most impossible circumstances; aggression, not moderation. In May 1945 Lachhiman Gurung, who was less than five feet tall, was with the 8th Gurkha Rifles in the Burma jungle. One night the Gurkhas’ position came under ferocious attack, and grenades flew into Gurung’s trench. He picked up and threw back the first and then a second, but a third exploded, ripping off fingers and injuring his face and side. With just his left arm working he managed to reload and fire his rifle, keeping the attackers at bay. At regular intervals, nearby fellow Gurkhas heard him shout: ‘Come and fight a Gurkha!’ At the end of the battle thirty-one Japanese soldiers were found lying dead around his trench. He always spoke modestly about the night he gained his VC: ‘I felt I was going to die anyway, so I might as well die standing on my feet. I’m glad that helped the other soldiers in my platoon, but they’d have all done the same thing.’30
Little wonder, therefore, that VCs became as rare as hen’s teeth, even in the army. Only one man gained a bar to his VC in the Second World War – Captain Charles Upham, who fought in the 20th Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force.31 The greater the hero, the bigger the modesty; Upham, a taciturn individual, simply said: ‘The military honours bestowed on me are the property of the men of my unit.’32 Upham won his first VC on Crete in May 1941 when in command of a platoon in the battle for Maleme airfield. During the course of an advance of 3,000 yards, his platoon was held up three times. Upham attacked a German machine-gun nest with grenades, killing eight paratroopers, destroyed another, and finally knocked out a Bofors anti-aircraft gun. The advance completed, he helped carry a wounded man to safety in full view of the enemy. Next day he was wounded in the shoulder by a mortar burst and hit in the foot by a bullet. He continued fighting, hobbling about in the open to draw enemy fire – the kind of reckless action that Simonds’s directive tried to discourage – and lodging his rifle in the fork of a tree to kill approaching Germans. During the retreat from Crete, while still injured, he climbed a steep ravine and used a Bren gun on advancing Germans, killing twenty-two out of fifty at a range of 500 yards. Upham’s VC prompted The Times to reflect in an editorial:
In the Baghdad of the Arabian Nights it used to be ordered that the story of any notable achievement should be written down in letters of gold. Is gold good enough, we can but ask, for the achievements of the two New Zealanders who have been awarded the Victoria Cross for valour? . . . the men of Talavera and of Waterloo were heroically brave; but there may be some excuse for asking whether the nature of modern warfare has not raised the standard of courage to heights unknown before.33
Upham’s second VC was awarded for his role during the defence of the Ruweisat Ridge at the Battle of El Alamein on 15 July 1942, when he ran through a position swept by machine-gun fire and lobbed grenades into a truck full of German soldiers. Later that day he took a Jeep on which a captured German machine gun had been mounted and drove it through the enemy position, at one point commandeering a bewildered group of Italian soldiers to push the Jeep out of the sand. By now wounded, Upham nevertheless led an attack on an enemy strong point, was shot in the elbow and captured, eventually being incarcerated in Colditz because he was such a difficult prisoner. His citation for the second VC read in part: ‘his complete indifference to danger and his personal bravery have become a
byword in the whole of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.’34 Upham fulfilled Simonds’s strictures: not only incredibly brave, but an example for all time.
The most appreciated and feted Second War VC winners were the determined killers in the Upham mould and, unlike the nineteenth century, rogues were permitted so long as they fulfilled the brief of setting an outstanding example. John Kenneally would have had his VC stripped from him in the nineteenth century, for he was a deserter. In April 1943 Kenneally was with the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, when he gained the VC for his part in the final assault on Tunis. Kenneally’s VC citation stated that he had ‘influenced the whole course of the battle’ – a key wording – by twice in the course of a few days picking up his Bren gun and, from the ridge where his unit was situated, charging single-handed down the bare hillside towards German troops who were gathering to attack. On the second occasion, he was wounded but refused medical treatment, and remained in the front line until the end of the day. Prior to this, on his eighteenth birthday, Kenneally had joined the Territorial Reserve of the Royal Artillery. When war broke out, he was posted to an anti-aircraft battery in north London, which he found enormously dull. In 1941 some Irish labourers persuaded him to desert and he went with them to Glasgow, where they gave him the identity card of John Patrick Kenneally, a labourer who had returned to Ireland. He adopted this new identity and enlisted with the Irish Guards in Manchester. When he got his VC, Kenneally later recalled: ‘It was the worst thing that could have happened to me. I thought I was bound to be rumbled.’35 ‘Rumbled’ he was; but progress had been made, and petty wrongdoing was no bar against a useful, inspirational hero legitimately gaining the VC in 1943. Courage-and-inspiration examples were useful propaganda; courage-but-failure had no wider use and would be overlooked.
Many VCs were recommended but few passed Simonds’s stringent tests; those who failed to get a VC were usually downgraded to the next decoration in the hierarchy. One illustrative case suggests that, even with a remarkable level of official support, a well-deserved VC could get turned down.36 On the morning of 2 March 1945, C Company of the Lake Superior Regiment (Motor), part of Canada’s 1st Army, was ordered to pass through positions held by A and B Companies in a gap to the south of the Hochwald Forest in Germany and to occupy a group of buildings. Acting Sergeant Charles Henry Byce, a twenty-four-year-old Métis, was part of C Company. The dawn attack was successful, but by early morning C Company was being shelled and mortared, and its three supporting tanks were knocked out; the company commander and all the other officers became casualties. Byce assumed command of his platoon. His task was to consolidate the left flank. The enemy were entrenched not more than seventy-five yards away and Byce’s platoon came under continuous machine-gun fire. Byce organized and led an assault on the enemy dugouts to quell resistance, moving from post to post, directing the fire of his men and maintaining contact with the other platoons.
As the day went on, enemy tanks manoeuvred into position for a counterattack. Byce took up the only remaining PIAT and stalked the German tanks.37 His first and second shots at the leading tank missed, thus giving away his position; the tanks then directed gunfire at him. He took aim again and knocked out the tank. A second German tank then appeared at a railway underpass; Byce realized that if he could destroy it in the underpass, it would block other tanks from attacking his position. He went forward with another soldier to a house which was a point of vantage, but found it occupied by the enemy. Sergeant Byce and his companion cleared the building with hand grenades, but by this time the tank was through and moving on to his position. He ordered his platoon to let the four enemy tanks go through them and then to open fire on the infantry following behind. This they did and the attack was broken up, the enemy infantry withdrawing. The tanks, however, remained and, with no further anti-tank weapons available, Byce realized that his platoon was no longer effective. He then extricated what remained of C Company. The Germans then called on Byce to surrender but he refused, instead ordering his men back across the bullet-swept ground to A Company lines. By now he had been in combat for almost twelve hours. For the rest of the afternoon he sniped at approaching enemy infantry on the railway embankment, killing seven and wounding eleven, before being relieved.
Byce’s VC citation was signed up the chain of command by the commanding officer of the Lake Superior Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Keane; approved by the acting brigade commander, Lieutenant Colonel G. D. Wotherspoon; endorsed by the acting 4th Division commander, Brigadier R. E. Moncel; approved by the corps commander, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds and by the commander of the 1st Canadian Army, General Harry Crerar; last but not least it was approved by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Yet Byce’s award was downgraded to a Distinguished Conduct Medal, although the citation clearly suggests a VC:
The magnificent courage and fighting spirit displayed by this Non-Commissioned Officer when faced with almost insuperable odds are beyond all praise. His gallant stand, without adequate weapons and with a bare handful of men against hopeless odds will remain, for all time, an outstanding example to all ranks of the regiment.38
Byce’s courageous action was obviously well written up, but lacked the almost unbelievable quality of, for example, that of Sergeant Thomas Derrick, an Australian who had already gained a DCM at El Alamein for destroying three machine-gun posts and two tanks and taking around 100 enemy prisoners. On 24 November 1943, the 26th Australian Brigade, in which Derrick was serving, was ordered to capture Sattelberg, a township in New Guinea sitting on a densely wooded and heavily defended hill that rose 1,000 metres. On 22 November, two of the Australian battalions had been pinned down some 600 metres from the top of the slope, and as night fell they were instructed to withdraw. Derrick refused, saying: ‘Bugger the CO. Just give me 20 more minutes and we’ll have this place. Tell him I’m pinned down and can’t get out.’39 What happened that night was truly remarkable. Derrick used one hand to clamber up the cliff and the other to lob grenades into machine-gun nests, clearing seven before returning to his platoon, gathering it up, and then personally assaulting and destroying three more, all at no more than eight metres’ range. As The Times reported: ‘Undoubtedly Sergeant Derrick’s fine leadership and refusal to admit defeat in the face of a seemingly impossible situation resulted in the capture of Sattelberg. His outstanding gallantry, thoroughness and devotion to duty were an inspiration not only to his platoon and company but to the whole battalion.’40
Winston Churchill, who as a dashing youth had proved his gallantry on numerous occasions and probably deserved the VC, ended the Second World War with nothing more than campaign medals. It was wrong, felt General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US forces in the Philippines. MacArthur reflected on the mammoth flights Churchill had taken in 1942, criss-crossing the Atlantic for a second meeting with Roosevelt, then flying to Cairo on a morale-boosting visit to the troops, then to Teheran to meet Stalin, and then back to London:
If disposal of all the Allied decorations were today placed by Providence in my hands, my first act would be to award the Victoria Cross to Winston Churchill. Not one of who wears it deserves it more than he. A flight of 10,000 miles through hostile and foreign skies may be the duty of young pilots, but for a Statesman burdened with the world’s cares it is an act of inspiring gallantry and valour.41
Buckingham Palace announced in December 1945 that King George VI, who had personally presented more than 44,000 decorations since the start of the war (and there were about 55,000 still to go), would henceforth send most decorations by post:
[T]he King does not propose to delegate to others the authority to present these medals on his behalf, as he regards each award as his own personal gift . . . the King will, however, continue to hand to their next-of-kin all decorations and medals, of whatever degree, awarded to those who fell in action before they could receive them at his hands.
On the select list of honours the king still intended to personally present, the VC was at the top.42
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7
The Integrity of the System
‘Sometimes one may feel that the utmost rot may be written about the British army, as long as it is complimentary rot, but that serious criticism . . . is somehow indecent.’
SPENCER FITZ-GIBBON1
‘If courage were common there would be no purpose in this book.’
LORD MORAN2
‘The system knows what to expect, and no one wants to upset the integrity of the system.’
MINISTRY OF DEFENCE COLONEL
Total VC s distributed as of December 2014
1,357 to 1,354 individuals (three bars)
1856–1914
522
1914–20
634
1920–39
5
1939–46
182
1946–2014
14